we are having real good
old times! Aren't we, now?"

"Oh, Kit!--my _dear_ Kit!--you must not speak so of your lost mother,"
cry the old ladies in a breath, both greatly distressed.

"Well, I shan't if you don't wish it; but it is true, for all that. And
so you are really going to ask that big young man and his little captain
to come here?"

"Your Aunt Penelope and I both feel that some hospitality should be
shown to Her Majesty," says Miss Priscilla, pompously.

"The Queen!" says Kit aghast. "You aren't going to ask _her_ to Moyne
are you? Windsor is a long way off, and she is pretty well on now, you
know, and I don't believe she'd come."

"Not personally. But we shall pay her the compliment through her trusty
servants the marines. Not that we owe her much," says Miss Priscilla,
shaking her head. "I cannot think she has behaved quite fairly towards
us in many ways. Never coming to see us, I mean, or sending the prince,
or having a residence here, or that----"

"Still," breaks in Miss Penelope, coming to Her Majesty's relief, with
the evident and kindly desire of showing her up in a more favorable
light, "I have always understood that in private life she is a most
exemplary woman,--a blameless wife so long as she was allowed to be so,
and a most excellent mother."

"And grandmother," chimes in Miss Priscilla, gracefully, as though
ashamed of her former acrimonious remarks. "From what I can glean from
the papers, she seems quite devoted to those poor little motherless
girls of Hesse."

It is quite plain that the Misses Blake regard their sovereign more as
Victoria and sister than queen and mistress.

"She has sent these men to Clonbree to protect our lives and properties
in these perilous times," goes on Miss Priscilla, in her clear, soft
voice, "and so I think we are bound to show them any civility in our
power."

"More especially the life and property of old Desmond," says Terry, at
this moment, with a noble disregard of consequences. He is sitting at a
distant window, tying flies, and makes this unfortunate remark without
the faintest appearance of malice prepense. "They say he is running a
regular rig with his tenants,--playing old Harry with 'em, in fact," he
goes on, debonairly; "but they'll stop his little game for him with a
bullet before long, I shouldn't wonder."

As the forbidden name is thus cavalierly thrown into their midst, like a
bomb, Monica flushes first a warm crimson and then turns cold